This thesis proposes a rereading of several films of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman through the guidelines drawn by a number of issues regarding theory and film analysis. It also deals with the need to problematize and, at the same time, diversify the kind of approaches in which most studies on the “auteur”, his “oeuvre” and so called “art cinema” within Film Studies have become: rigid approaches overshadowed by ideas closely linked to the canon, intentionality and aestheticism.
Audio-visual composition and formal techniques within the filmic text represent our object of study beyond narrative components. Film is regarded in this thesis as a space where various enunciative, audio-visual and plastic mechanisms coexist and overlap and whose mise-en-scène is formulated as a heterogeneous tissue of interrelated registers and articulations. In other words, as an action in continuous process rather than as a whole or an organic element. Within this framework, Jacques Derrida’s notion of writing (écriture), which establishes the fundamental basis to address the conditions and mechanisms that form part of the cinematic phenomenon by analyzing montage, is conceived as the main instrument of enunciation within expression and meaning.
Our second objective answers a series of questions that have arisen when studying Bergman’s films. Notions such as authorship, style, “art film”, and canon allow us to develop a link between his work and a research and critical proposal, especially since much of his films delve precisely into in these issues. The existing bibliography on Bergman’s work is certainly vast, but still leaves a large number of questions unanswered and a vacuum regarding approaches of a formal nature as well as textual analysis that expose the ways in which spatiotemporal relations, composition, meaning processes and dialogue with other cinemas have been built. There is also a lack of studies that take into account ideological stances and sources and more rigorous gender approaches.
This work also outlines a critical review of the cinema produced in Sweden and Scandinavia. Practices and traditions are reflected upon within a broader context of Western cinema that have been relevant and that Bergman also helped to establish. In addition, it highlights the channels through which his films have gone through, both in theory and analysis as well as in their reception and the ways in which this manifests itself in some of the director’s films to the extent that they represent a challenging paradigm that retrospectively illustrates a crucial outlook of film criticism tendencies still prevailing.